NZ Broadband speeds increasing - there's more news

January 13, 2015

My last blog post of 2014 was to draw attention to the latest TrueNet results around the increasing speeds of broadband access in New Zealand - and now over the break (well, the kiwi summer break) comes the latest report from Akamai. This tells a slightly different story and comes out with different numbers but again indicates average speeds continue to increase.

In the APAC region Indonesia had the largest yearly increase in average peak connection speeds at 166% (as measured by Akamai) while we were in the next 'tier' grouped with Singapore and China where average peak speeds were up more than 50% over the previous year. Unfortunately that increase still only puts us on 50th spot when ranked globally (at an average peak speed of 32.2 Mbps), 6 places behind Australia, but with Hong Kong out in front with a peak speed of 84.6 Mbps. When looking at average connection speeds (rather than peak) we come out at 42nd globally (Australia is at 44th) with an average of 7 Mbps.

Two other interesting measures that Akamai report on is the percentage of connections above certain speeds - New Zealand is reported as having 14% of connections at over 10 Mbps average, and 77% of connections at over 4 Mbps. Obviously, we want these numbers to continue to climb, and expect them to as new technologies are taken up by users.

Akamai also publish numbers around connection speeds on mobile networks with New Zealand reporting average connection speeds of 3.3 Mbps and a peak of 21 Mbps. We remain behind Australia in these measures, and considerably behind the APAC leader, South Korea, with average connections speeds of 18.2 Mbps. Expect the numbers for New Zealand to continue to improve as the new 4G networks continue to be rolled out.